The last time I blogged I was telling you about IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager on Windows and just how cool it was. Well, I am working on some more neat stuff and I wanted to tell you about a beta program for upcoming release of FlashCopy Manager. It is called the Beta program for IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager. If you want to test some of the new functions and features of the upcoming release of IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, please contact Mary Anne Filosa (mfilosa@us.ibm.com) or your IBM Sales representative to get details.

The enrollment period is ending soon, so don't wait to be a part of the action!

The count down is on... with only 2 weeks left to Pulse 2010, I wanted to give you and update on additional perks you'll have access to if you register and attend.Meet the Experts!Talk one-on-one with Product Experts

Check out my previous blog,The Pulse Roadmap to Storage Expertise, for information on some of the sessions that you can attend. Use the on-line agenda tool
to build your agenda and view all the sessions available (requires only
an IBM.com password - you do NOT have to be a Pulse registered attendee
to create a Pulse schedule online).

Share Your StoryThis year at Pulse 2010 we are scheduling video tape interviews with clients who are willing to share their thoughts on what they are doing to achieve visibility, control, and automation in their infrastructure. We will be filming client videos at Pulse starting Sunday, February 21, through Wednesday, February 24. The content will be used to produce short videos that we will leverage to tell the needs clients are addressing in their organizations. Our customers have been sharing their stories throughout 2009 as you can see below. Interested in participating? Notify me at woodhams@us.ibm.com

on my previous blog i've discussed some of the viable approaches to data protection with virtual machines, before i dwell into the pros and cons of each approach i'd like to discuss the fundamental differences between file level and block level backup (and solicit your input :-) ).

Encapsulation is one of the basic rules for software design, simply put, it's the computer geek's equivalent of the famous "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. The idea is pretty simple, let's assume our File System is component A and our Disk System is component B. Component A and B publish a public interface that others can use, but they hide their internal mechanisms from the other components. This enables us to do some nifty tricks, such as RAID, as far as the file system is concerned it is working with a "regular disk", it is unaware of the fact that our disk system had actually taken the 100GB disk space that we defined and partitioned it into multiple strips that are actually located across 5 different disks in order to provide it (the FS) with better performance and hardware fault tolerant. There are other ways where this principle is used but you have to agree that it comes in pretty handy.

But, why do i even mention "encapsulation", and how is that relevant to File VS Block level backups?

The point i am trying to make is that the Disk level is not aware of the "file contents"and the File System is not aware of the "disk layout", this actually dictates the pros and cons of those two very different approaches to data protection.

With file level backups it's really easy to define which files you want to protect, than when the time comes, someone has to access the files and move the data they contain to some sort of data repository, in order to do that you must deal with issues such as:

- Open files

- Interdependencies between multiple files

- Identifying which (sub)files have changed

- For structured data (databases etc.), do we backup the entire file (or file group) or only the portions that have changed?

Block level backups are usually pretty straight forward, there's a mechanism that keeps track of the changed in "realtime" (this usually enables CDP, but that's a whole different story) and when the time comes the data will be moved to the data repository, but this technology has its own challenges

Generally speaking block level backups have a "lower overhead" than file level backup, so, if you decided to virtualize your environment and keep using agents on the individual virtual machines, you would probably want to use a block level backup solution. File Level backups are still viable (especially if they skip the "indexing" process by using an FS filter or journaling and allow for "sub file" incremental backup), but you will need to be more careful when planning your backup windows in order to prevent VM sprawl.

On 19 March 2010, IBM will release Tivoli Storage Manager V6.2, the next in a long line of enhancements to the leader in enterprise-wide data protection, unified recovery management and effective data reduction. Highlighting this release is the addition of source (client-side) data deduplication, tighter integration with TSM FastBack, enhanced support for virtual server environments, automatic deployment of Windows client upgrades, and improved automation and performance of back-end data management processing.

Source (Client-Side) Data Deduplication: Eliminates sending over the network the chunks of data that are already managed by the TSM Server, speeding backups and reducing bandwidth requirements. This is an excellent remote office backup solution for offices with a small number of servers, where the addition of a separate backup server is not justifiable.

Tighter integration with TSM FastBack: Further delivering on Unified Recovery Management, TSM FastBack servers and TSM FastBack for Workstations clients can now be managed directly by the TSM Admin Center. From a single user interface, you can now manage your end-to-end data protection and recovery infrastructure.

Enhanced support for Virtual Server Environments: Support for the VMware vStorage API and VSS snapshots in Microsoft Hyper-V give customers more choices and greater control of protecting and restoring data on virtual servers.

Automatic deployment of Windows Client Upgrades: Configurable policies and schedules for pushing client updates will help reduce administration time as well as the risk of errors that can occur when manually updating a large number of client systems.

Improved Automation and Performance of Back-End Data Management Processes: The TSM Server can now simultaneously perform several data management processes, including data migration, copy pool backup and copy active data; this can result in freeing up server resources for other tasks, including additional or more frequent backup job processing.

The end of last year was pretty hectic for a lot of us and you might not have attended IBM's "Information on Demand Gala" but as a refresher, we introduced our Smart Archive Strategy. Several of my customers have been asking for a refresher on the topic and we've just posted a short video describing this comprehensive approach that combines IBM software, systems and service capabilities designed to help you extract value and gain new intelligence from information by collecting, organizing, analyzing and leveraging that information. For more information, watch this video, visit the IBM Smart Archive Strategy Website and meet me at Pulse 2010 by attending the Storage Track sessions to discuss your specific archiving needs.

IBM will be providing a series of live web-based demonstrations dedicated to showing you the value of IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager. It will also show you how the product works. These will be DEMOS of live code.

Organizations seeking to improve protection for Business Critical Application Data can leverage Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager to simplify management through integration with IBM Storage Hardware Advanced Snapshot technology. As the first event in a series of Customer Web Conferences we will focus on demonstrating the features of Tivoli FlashCopy Manager for the Microsoft Exchange Environment.

Audience: IBM Customers and their associated IBM and Business Partner Sales representatives

Mark Your Calendars! IBM will be presenting a series of live demonstration dedicated to showing the value of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) FastBack and TSM FastBack for Exchange data protection products. These additions to the TSM product family offers the ability to meet aggressive Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives in an organization's data protection service.

The TSM FastBack family provides many advanced features including:Instant Restore allows users to access to their data or application immediately, while the restore is taking place.Continuous Data Protection sends backup data continuously which allows a recovery to be done to any point in time.Incremental Forever Backups prevents wasting time and money in performing and storing unnecessary full backups. Each backup appears to be a Full backup, but only the blocks that have been modified are copied.FastBack Mount allows access to backed up data without it being recovered. This enables data to be validated after backups, the correct data to be identified before it is recovered, or data to be opened and its contentsto be recovered at a more granular level, thus reducing the size and time of the recovery.Exchange Brick-level Recovery allows individual Exchange mail objects to be recovered from a previous backup without requiring an entire Exchange Database to be recovered. TSM FastBack for Exchange does not require additional backup processing to provide IMR.Branch Office Disaster Recovery allows replication of branch office backup data to a central site. This data can be compressed and encrypted during the transfer. The replicated data at the central site can be used as the source for creating a tape copy of the data or for recovering branch office data and hosts. TSM FastBack allows the backups and replication of multiple branch offices to be monitored with a single tool.TSM FastBack Bare Machine Recoveryallows hosts to be quickly recovered, even to dissimilar hardware.

These demonstrations are open to Customers, Business Partners and IBM employees.

TSM FastBack Demo Schedule for 2010:Demos will be available in English and Spanish. All English calls will be at 10:30 AM and 3:00 PM Central Time on Thursdays. All Spanish calls will be available at 1:00 PM Central Time on Wednesdays.

There are Web Conference and Audio Conference components to this demonstration.Web Conferencewww.sametimeunyte.comConference ID is FASTBAK Prior to the web conference, we suggest you do the following:1) go to www.sametimeunyte.com2) click on Support3) click on Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting System Check 4) Select attendee type and click Next5) Proceed with the system check and install any plug-ins required.

The day started off with the General Session where Al Zollar, the General Manager of Tivoli started off with the discussion around Smarter Planet and how the world is getting smarter - Instrumented - Interconnected - Intelligent. He gave several examples of how companies are shifting to become smarter, smarter buildings, smarter healthcare, smarter citeis etc. By becoming smarter Al explained that both Risk and Complexity can be reduced.

I enjoyed hearing about Capital Region of Denmark and how they have over 1.5 Billion bytes archived and they revolutionized their storage management so that they manage all that data with 4 staff members.

The presentation then went into Integrated Service Management for Data Centers, for Design & Delivery, and for Industries which consists of

Service architectures tailored by industries

Service lifecycle management

Service dashboards

Unified management of service requests and incidents

Asset management

Automated management

and the importance of... Visibility, Control, and Automation!

There were also some new storage announcements made in the general session (stop by the expo to see the demo of each product):

The other speakers included Rational General Manager Danny Sabbah to dive deeper into Integrated Service Management for Design & Delivery, Laura Sanders Tivoli Vice President of Strategy & Development for an entertaining demonstration with live code showing a smarter city (accompanied by Dave Lindquist IBM Fellow, Vice President & CTO, Tivoli Software and Dr. Wing To Vice President Strategy and Product Management, Tivoli Software). After the demo the last IBM speaker was Mike Rhodin and he went more into more depth around Integrated Service Management for Industries.

The guest speaker to wrap up the General Session was former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore.

After the General Session, the rest of my day is a blur. It was filled with attending the Storage & Information Infrastructure track kick-off, meetings with customers and business partners to do impromptu video interviews/podcasts, tweeting, reporting storage highlights for the Pulse Points daily newsletter, checking out the expo and the demos and scheduling more video interviews. I had to have walked at least 6 miles today with making trips to and from the conferenece center several times. I was a little bummbed that I wasn't able to attend as many of the customer case sessions in the storage track, I'll have to make up for that tomorrow.

Pulse kicked-off today with the Business Partner Summit. I attended the IBM Information Archive session where the partners attending and I learned about the Archiving Ecosystem and how IBM Infromation Archive helps: reduce costs, improve productivity / effeciency and reduce risks. Information Archive is a simplified, cloud-ready smart business system.

Some important questions to help understand whether or not an archiving solution is needed include:

What are you doing to better manage the explosive growth of email + attachments on your mail servers?

What are you doing to better manage other types of content such as files, sharepoint data, social networking, images, videos, etc.?

Have you ever had to respond to a legal discovery request?

What is your litigation and/or compliance risk (how many lawsuits and/or industry regulations are you prepared to defend) and how are you managing paper and electronic info...

The partners in the session had a lot of great comments and questions.I met a few of the partners... Bill Mansfield from Logicalis and Mike Wiseley and Bruce Wolff from Agilysys. Below is a picture of Mike and Bruce.

If you are a partner and you were unable to attend the IBM Information Archive session (or you attended but want to hear more) you can attend the other sessions that are scheduled at Pulse:A technical look inside IBM's next generation archive appliance Tuesday 3:30-4:30pm @ RM 120IBM's Smart Archive Strategy Simplifying Information Retention Tuesday 5:00-6:00pm @ RM 120Birds of a Feather: IBM Smart Archive Strategy Discussion Tuesday 6:00-7:00pm @ RM 120

Next stop for me is the Pulse 2010 Business Partner Summit General Session!

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is a great continuous data
protection, backup and recovery solution for both midmarket and
large enterprise organizations, for branch offices or data centers.
For more storage sessions while at Pulse 2010 check out this blog
post
https://www-950.ibm.com/blogs/tivolistorage/entry/the_pulse_roadmap_to_storage_expertise?lang=en_us

Pulse 2010 got off to a great start with a very successfule Business Partner Summit. There were several Storage partners that attended the Storage Breakout session. We were even able to get some of them to sign up for professional video interviews...

During the Tivoli Storage Software Strategy and How to Sell It! session Dan Galvan VP IBM Systems Storage Marketing gave an overview of the Smarter Planet initiative and Ron Riffe provided an indepth presentation on the storage software portfolio. Partners were informed of three solution plays that they can focus on for storage. There were many questions that were asked and answered.

We also provided details on how our partners can stay connected during and after Pulse with IBM Storage networks and social media. These networks are also available to our customers and our partners' customers.

Tivoli Storage Blog for getting conference updates and daily highlights from Pulse 2010. This blog is used to discuss many different topics like data reduction, virtualization, new product announcements and more..

IBM Storage Community for manageing your contacts at Pulse, sharing links and bookmarks, and providing feedbak on the conference

IBM Storage on Twitter for listening and contributing to realtime buzz with other Pulse attendees and organizing meetups. Use #ibmpulse in your tweets. You can also follow me on twitter

I had the pleasure of interviewing one of our client speakers, Brian Perlstein from Oakwood Healthcare System. Brian will be presenting the Oakwood Healthcare System's Virtualization story on Wednesday Feb. 24th at 9:30 to 10:30 am in the Conference Center room 121. Hope to see you there!

Yesterday I interviewed Greg Johnson, CTO and Director of Technology and Engineering Services for Virginia Commonwealth University Health System (VCUHS). Greg presented at Pulseon Tuesday and he discussed how VCUHS is transforming IT in a healthcare environment focussing on their storage solutions and backup and recovery solutions. If you weren't able to attend Greg's session on Tuesday at 2:00 - 3:00 pm in the Conference Center room 120, watch the video below and you'll see a high-level recap of what he presented.

Once again, this was a live interview from outside the expo hall in the MGM and the McCarran International Airport, sure is one of the busiest airports in the world... maybe I should have done my interviews inside the conference. I enjoyed the fresh air and the airplanes in the background just adds to the beauty of the live interview. I still think that Journalism is a field that I will not be pursuing... hopefully my interview skills will improve before Pulse 2011, which will be Feb. 27 - Mar. 3 2011.